14:05 | 06/27/2024
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The watercolour by artist Thomas Taylor painted for The Philosopher’s Stone and which fixed the image of Harry Potter in the collective imagination, was sold on Wednesday for 1.9 million dollars, three times its highest estimate ($600,000), Sotheby’s announced.
Four people bid by telephone for ten minutes until they reached that price, the highest ever achieved for an object related to the popular character created by the British writer JK Rowling in 1997.
Taylor painted his watercolor when he was only 23 years old and when he himself could not imagine the boom that the saga of the boy-wizard would become, translated into 80 languages and which has sold more than half a million copies, in addition to becoming a character in a film and a Broadway musical.
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{{msg}} {{msg}}The watercolor – depicting Harry Potter as a bespectacled boy with brown hair and a red and yellow striped scarf – was first auctioned in London in 2001, and then also quadrupled estimates to sell for £85,750.
On this occasion, it was put up for sale by collector Rodney P. Swantko, along with pieces of literature from Europe and the United States from the 19th and 20th centuries. (NA)
